Got five dollars you don’t need? Here is a good cause that could use it.

Obviously from the title I’m not that great at asking for help, so please bear with me. Plus it isn’t really help for ME, but rather for some kids who could really use it. If you want to skip all the stuff below and to help me reach my goal of helping get over a dozen city kids into the great outdoors for the first time in their lives, you can go straight here:

Big City Mountaineers gets city kids into the outdoors to learn outdoor skills and to be mentored; these trips are not day hikes, but rather week-long backpacking trips with a defined goal like scaling a certain peak, and what makes this charity amazing is that the ratio of mentors to kids on each trip is ONE TO ONE. If there are eight kids, there are eight adult mentors, and so much of the time is spent talking about their lives and their challenges. To know why I felt compelled to do this, PLEASE take three minutes to watch this video narrated by one of the kids; it explains it better than I ever could:

I am quite close to my goal of raising $4500, and if friends who want to help can donate even what we all spend on a good coffee or a decent lunch, it can help me get over the top.

If I CAN reach this goal, which would allow at least a dozen kids like Taylor, who have had a pretty tough life through no fault of their own, to do something COMPLETELY new that they would never get to do without our help, and perhaps impact them in ways larger than this one week.

Again, here is my donation page and my essay that I wrote in order to be part of this: